Taking Down Backpage
Taking Down Backpage: Fighting the World’s Largest Sex Trafficker
By: Maggy Krell
“I learned that justice doesn’t keep score. There is really no such thing as a win or a loss. Each day, you go in, you do your very best work, you seek justice, and you pray to God that you can leave a lasting impact and make your community a little safer.”
Maggy Krell did make our communities a little safer… at least for the most part. More on that later.
I had never heard of Backpage before but when I saw the title of this book I was really curious and wanted to read more.
These days I feel like I hear more about people wanting to legalize prostitution and ‘sex work’ or the ever-expanding ‘sexual freedom’ rights people apparently don’t have enough of than I hear about anyone fighting human trafficking.
This book was an encouragement that there are people who are fighting the second largest criminal business in the world— human trafficking— and are having success!
“This is a case about a new generation of slave traders who have created an online marketplace to exploit the most vulnerable people in our society, all while pocketing millions and millions of dollars each month.”
What is Backpage?
“In 2013, the aider and abettor and the commercial sex industry’s biggest beneficiary was a website: Backpage dot com. Virtually every sex-trafficking case we prosecuted included an online ad posted on Backpage dot com. The brothels from Operation Wilted Flower used it to advertise. The street traffickers… often sold victims to more than ten men a night using Backpage. Gangs used it to move victims around in a horrifying network of exploitation and violence. There was no doubt that Backpage exponentially expanded this growing criminal industry.”
Operating in over 800 cities globally, Backpage was a website made to look like Craigslist, selling/listing things in a variety of categories: furniture, cars, etc. But “90-100% of their revenue was from the ‘escort’ section.”
It became a years-long battle that Krell undertook to try to shutdown this website facilitating the selling of trafficked women and children every night and profiting from this illegal exploitation.
The Legal Battle
Maggy Krell kept a post-it note on her desk with her three goals on this case:
Get a felony conviction.
Shut down the website.
Fix the CDA.
The CDA is the Communications Decency Act (CDA) which protects internet service providers from liability for the words or actions of their users. This is the shield Backpage was hiding behind with the charges brought against them. They claimed to be merely a platform that is not responsible for what people do on their page.
They cooperated with law enforcement on many occasions to take down ads for sexually exploited children. But it became clear to Krell that they were doing the bare minimum to appease law enforcement so they wouldn’t get shutdown.
Krell had the legal burden to show that the owners of Backpage knowingly accepted money for these crimes and also created this content on their site.
She attempted to charge the owners with pimping but those charges didn’t stick. Ultimately the charges that enabled her to bring the case to trial was money laundering and conspiracy.
The amount of work it took her and her team and the teams she collaborated with to accumulate enough of the right kind of evidence and obtain it legally took years.
Her ambition is incredible! Most people would have given up but her passion drove her to do what it took to accomplish her goals.
The book details all of the legal hoops she jumped through and her evidence gathering missions, but in short [SPOILER ALERT]:
The primary owner of Backpage cooperated with law enforcement to shorten his sentence and provided more evidence and information against his colleagues. Krell got convictions for all three primary financial beneficiaries.
The website is shutdown.
During his presidency, Trump signed a bill that changed the CDA to prevent it from being used as a shield from criminal enforcement, specifically of the crime of human trafficking. It also allowed “victims to privately sue an internet service provider that aided in their victimization.”
“National research study showed that following the shutdown of Backpage, sex trafficking declined by more than 25%. The study found, based on analytical data, that demand had also been reduced.”
I’m not sure how they obtained this information and whether it was global or just national, but regardless, this case made a significant impact against the sex trafficking industry.
Krell also made significant changes in the way law enforcement handles these cases by emphasizing that the women and children involved should not be prosecuted as criminals— they are rape victims and victims of trauma.
“I had no interest in prosecuting the women themselves or arresting them to coerce cooperation, even though that was what other departments were doing. These women were victims. But they would never say so. And definitely not in court. Traumatized, ashamed, terrified of their pimps and traffickers, they were rightly fearful that talking to law enforcement could cause harm to a relative back home or their own injury or death.”
Instead of going after prostitutes, going after the big players like Backpage is how we will see a decline of this horrific practice.
Decriminalizing Sex Work?
I’m not sure how anyone who reads this book would come away thinking- “Yes, we definitely need to decriminalize sex work. It’s a harmless industry full of consensual acts where people are just trying to make a living.”
It’s clear that human trafficking is a problem. Child sex trafficking is rampant. And what’s sad is that we can’t even get a clear picture of it because of under-reporting and that:
“Victims do not always self-identify as victims because of the way they have been manipulated and because they have internalized so much trauma.”
“Statistically, the path to sex work often includes being raped or molested at a young age, being sexually exploited by a trafficker as a teenager, lacking a stable family environment, running away from an abusive home or group home, growing up in the system, and never experiencing consistent, unconditional love.”
Seeing how this industry is so corrupt already, I fail to see how decriminalizing prostitution and sex work will make this environment better. It could only get worse.
If it is no longer a crime, how could law enforcement ever make headway on determining when people are being trafficked and when transactions are consensual? How could they ever get into the places to the people who need them if they need probable cause and the act is no longer criminal?
“While a commercial sex transaction may seem consensual on the surface, the lopsided power dynamic, the history of trauma and abuse, and the lack of options often make the consent illusory.”
Decriminalizing it will increase the demand substantially because people won’t have to risk being charged with a crime.
Increased demand will be filled one way or another. And we already see how that is accomplished.
It is absurd, not to mention extremely insulting to survivors of human trafficking, to think decriminalizing prostitution and sex work would be a positive for our society and our communities in any way.
“There need to be fewer on-ramps and more off-ramps when it comes to the commercial sex trade.”
Planned Parenthood
Let’s circle back to my comment that Krell has ‘mostly’ made our communities safer.
She did phenomenal work in bringing down Backpage and her sensitivity to the victims and advocating for them and helping them get the help they need mentally, physically, and to get a fresh start moving forward is amazing!
So imagine my confusion when I find out that she got a new job as the Chief Legal Counsel at Planned Parenthood.
Her idea of ‘victim’ is narrow because apparently she does not view the voiceless lives in the womb as needing advocates or worthy of life and protection.
She explains her career change:
“I really felt a calling toward Planned Parenthood. I read a study showing that 80 percent of trafficking victims seek medical care at some point while they are being trafficked— and not just through the emergency room: 70 percent visit a community clinic like Planned Parenthood…
…Traffickers often withheld condoms and birth control pills to control and manipulate their victims. Planned Parenthood was a safe space where women could confidentially access reproductive health care, as well as emotional support… and yet, under President Trump, Planned Parenthood and its patients were under attack.”
On the surface, this seems noble. However, there are numerous ways to support these survivors and help them than to offer abortions.
Of course becoming pregnant from such a terrible thing is traumatic, there is no doubt of that. But we don’t heal the pain and the injustice by taking the life of another, no matter the circumstances of the conception or how unwanted the baby is.
We offer support in all the other ways. And Planned Parenthood is not the only place doing this. Our local community has a place called Agape Pregnancy Center that does all the things Krell desires for survivors— except abortion. I’m sure there are many other organizations doing the same.
The ‘attacks’ she claims Trump was making were about abortion. The government offered to continue funding Planned Parenthood if they stopped doing abortions. They refused. Because pretty much all of their revenue is from abortions. Apparently they didn’t care enough about women’s health to get funding unless they were able to continue killing babies in the womb.
It is also confounding to me that as Chief Legal Counsel to Planned Parenthood, and being privy to the information that came out about the selling of body parts and the partial birth abortions and the other horrific practices done on a day-to-day basis at these centers, she would continue to defend Planned Parenthood and promote them. It seems so incongruent with her sense of justice and victimhood in the rest of this book.
She says,
“We need to continue fighting for a cultural shift to dismantle the stubborn legacy of misogyny and be a society that truly values women and girls.”
I’m not sure how I feel about her saying this.
First- I’m not sure the correct blame is placed on misogyny. The current case of Ghislaine Maxwell is proof that women traffick and abuse as well. I believe the blame is simply on sin and the increasing belief people have that they should be able to have whatever sexual freedoms they desire. And of course, people will meet about any demand if they see money in it. The claim of misogyny is too narrow and misses the larger and more important point.
Second- it’s hard to believe her stance on the 'valuing women and girls’ when I see the contradiction in her defending abortions.
She comments how young black girls are disproportionately affected by human-trafficking in greater numbers.
Yet she fails to see that the abortion industry is the same. More African-American babies are aborted than any other in the US.
She wants to value women and girls yet abortions are done on vastly more girl babies than boy babies. This also in turn creates a ‘shortage’ of women in countries like China and India which creates a market for human trafficking for men to have wives.
If she truly wants to create a world that values women and girls, she must rethink the moral dissonance she lives.
A Couple Critiques
My review for this book is largely on content, but there is one remark to writing style to address that I’m gonna slide in here quick.
The writing is not anecdotal and is heavy on legal proceedings. There is some dullness in this way. Yet Krell is a prosecutor telling it from her perspective as a prosecutor, and so these writing choices make sense.
As another reviewer put it, to provide a more ‘human’ connection some reviewers had hoped for would be to exploit these survivors again. It’s their stories to tell and Krell was sensitive to not provide more information on their lives than was necessary to explain the case.
Also, I wish she would have addressed more of the pornography side of this industry. Porn is largely accepted in culture today as if it is a harmless thing but it is intimately connected to sex-trafficking and we are naive to think we could ever separate them.
Conclusion
Maggy Krell has made a major accomplishment as described in this book, but I can’t ignore the double-standard she lives now as Chief Legal Counsel of Planned Parenthood.
My prayer is that she would recognize the victims killed at the hands of Planned Parenthood and take down the culprits just as she did with Backpage. She is more than capable.
All that to say, this does not affect my high rating of the book. I still recommend this book be read!
We need to be made more aware of this criminal industry so we do not view sexual exploitation as normal or accepted.
**Received an ARC via NetGalley**
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